Tag: Individual

Privacy ‘safe-harbour’ and Australia

– not safe enough?

The decision by the European Court of Justice to declare the Safe Harbour arrangements between the US and EU invalid will have interesting repercussions not only for European citizens and companies such as Facebook and Google, but also for countries that increasingly rely on selling services overseas like Australia and New Zealand.

The decision was made as result of a case brought by Austrian citizen Maximillian Schrems on the use of his data by Facebook and in particular the practices of the US government as revealed by Edward Snowden.

This judgment has the consequence that the Irish supervisory authority* is required to examine Mr Schrems’ complaint with all due diligence and, at the conclusion of its investigation, is to decide whether, pursuant to the directive, transfer of the data of Facebook’s European subscribers to the United States should be suspended on the ground that that country does not afford an adequate level of protection of personal data. http://curia.europa.eu press release 6 October
*Facebook European HQ is in Ireland

Safe Harbour, is an agreement that had been in place since 2000. It was supposed to give the protections to private data collected by multinational companies on EU citizens wherever it was stored. This allowed Facebook to store EU citizens’ data in the US or wherever it was most efficient, but required them to treat it to the EU’s standards, rather than the more relaxed US standards.

The judgement is an indication of the deep unhappiness in Europe with the US’s cavalier approach to non-US citizen’s data. The US’s binary approach to citizen rights makes many non-US citizens bristle. It is like the Pax Romana of the Roman Empire 2000 years ago.

This decision will not ‘destroy cloud’ in Europe or elsewhere. However, it will require some reorganisation. In this, it will hurt second and third tier players more than Facebook, Amazon and Google.

Moreover, the decision will not seriously curb mass surveillance. The dirty little (not so) secret is that all countries spy on their citizens for mostly good reasons, including the Europeans. It’s just that the US is better at it than most others.

When the big players jostle, smaller countries feel the waves.

For Australian organisations, not only those who hold EU citizens’ data, this decision should cause them pause for thought. Organisations that do not take privacy seriously, or only respect the privacy of a subset of their stakeholders, need to rethink their approach, if only in terms of the reputational damage of a breech in markets like the EU.

The Internet becomes less than one – Time for an International Law of Cyberspace

The Internet has never been one network for all, As much as some might wish, it is a motley collection of many nets with a very minimal governance. The main effect of this decision is to further balkanise the Internet in a similar way to content geo-blocking and country firewalls.

Smaller countries like Australia and New Zealand should be concerned. We need to be able to trade on an even playing field in services. And that means having an Internet that is common to us and our competitors, both in terms of technology and policy. We need common laws governing cyberspace as much as we need trade barriers on physical goods like rice to be reduced.

This is the time that Australia, New Zealand and similar countries should be pushing hard diplomatically for an international ‘Law of Cyberspace’ which achieves the equivalent that the conventions on the Law of the Sea achieved for maritime commerce. It took 300 years for the Law of the Sea to come to pass and it’s still being updated – let’s hope that the law of cyberspace takes much, much less time.

Is it possible to enhance privacy with social login?

The likelihood that any Australian Government is going to create an online identity credential now seems distant with the National Trusted Identities Framework (NTIF) almost forgotten. How quickly the Internet forgets, but maybe that’s a good thing if you’re Mario Costeja González.

But the need that the NTIF sought to fill has not gone away. Governments are trying to work out how to service their citizen/customer/users at lower cost. The Internet offers one possibility, but in taking their services online, government agencies expose themselves and us to different threats and potentially higher risk. However, it seems inevitable that government agencies will follow financial institutions in offering higher value transactions online. In the end, the economic argument is likely to drive government agency migration online with more high trust services. Recent federal and state/territory budget announcements are only likely to spur this movement.

There are a number of threats that need to be mitigated before a government agency could potentially provide its services online. Probably the key issue is for the agency to be sure that a user requesting access to a site is who they say they are. Currently issuing the customer with a username and password mostly does this, but the model is beginning to fail. The problem is that most people don’t interact with government agencies on a regular basis and yet information sensitivity and computer capabilities require users to adopt increasingly complex and non-sensical passwords.

It’s all getting a bit hard

This in turn makes the passwords more difficult to remember even as they are harder to crack. It also means that password resets are much demanded. Yet at the same time, customers are expected to change their passwords regularly, not to write them down or repeat them for other online services.

It seems clear that these password requirements largely force customers to break their user agreements and either, write their passwords down, or worse re-use them for other services/websites.

It also puts government agencies in a bind. They want to provide online access to their services because it could be cheaper to operate than bricks and mortar outlets (if they didn’t have to reset too many passwords), but they also do not want to be embarrassed by privacy and security breaches.

One option is the use of a social login to help secure online authentication. This could enhance user information security and minimise privacy breaches. Social login, also known as social sign-in, is a form of simple sign-on (to web resources) using existing membership of a social networking service such as Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter or Google+ to sign into a third party website in lieu of creating a new login account specifically for that website or service. Social login is designed to simplify logins for end users as well as provide more and more reliable demographic information to website owners. Social login can be used as a mechanism for both identity authentication and user authorisation.

Social login is being adopted by private sector organisations for a number of reasons including: Rapid registration; Verified email contacts; and Customer stickiness. However social login also offers three major benefits for government agencies.

– Currency of contact data. Contact data such as email tend to be kept up to date by the user.

– Passwords are less easily forgotten because they are regularly used. At the same time, the social login passwords are not transmitted from the user to the agency website.

– Security. Agencies can leverage security technologies implemented by the social networks that they might never be able to replicate themselves. Because of their resources, social networks such as Google and Facebook are able to detect and patch zero day exploits quickly.

So what are the privacy risks?

A user, when accepting the convenience of a social login, can share a significant amount of their information between a third party website (such as a government agency) and the social network. The social site is informed of every social login performed by the user. Often, it is worth considering whether users understand exactly what they are sharing and whether they are giving informed consent to share. However this risk can be mitigated with the creation of clear and detailed login screens, which explain what the users are sharing.

As an example, the following information is returned when a Facebook user agrees to share their ‘Basic Profile’. Other than the email, the information is not verified and may not be present. However, several organisations claim that the quality of the data returned is in general very good because social network users feel social pressure from their friends to be accurate.

Address

Birthday

Verified Email

Display Name

Family Name

Formatted Name

Gender

Given Name

Homepage

Preferred Username

Profile Photo

Time Zone

At the same time, it is not necessary for the third party website to collect all the information if it is not required.

Another issue surrounds current sensitivities with the USA NSA’s indiscriminate hoovering of online data. It is important to note that because all the large social networking sites are based in the USA, they are subject to USA’s laws and customs related to security and privacy. Under that regime, Australians are given significantly fewer protections than USA citizens or residents. Effectively, the social networking site itself provides the main protection for reputational reasons. However, readers may be aware that there have been recent moves in the USA to change this approach for what the US charmingly calls ‘aliens’ like Australians and give the same protections for all users irrespective of citizenship.

Can we get the benefits of social login and have citizen privacy as well?

With careful design it seems possible that social login could enhance privacy for users at the same time as providing benefits to government agencies. Considering the social login as an adjunct to agency authentication rather than the whole process could be an answer. If customers nominate their social login at the same time as they were enrolled into a government service, they could later use their social login as the first stage of an authentication process. This would provide an outer layer of defence against hacking. The user could then login to the agency itself using a separate authentication process.

The advantages of this model, beyond defence in depth, are that the user logs into the agency with their authenticated social login username, but does not gain access to sensitive information without providing an agency specific authentication. The social network also does not receive any sensitive information beyond the fact that a user logged in at a website. The use of government portals can be used to obfuscate which agency a user is accessing. At the same time, with consent, contact information from the social login site could be compared with that held by the agency and presented to users so that they can choose to update the information held on them by the agency.

At both the state and federal level, government agencies are starting to actively consider social login. Provided that governments are also prepared to carefully design the user interaction so that the social networks don’t get any more personal information than the user/citizen is prepared to share – by turning off analytics and sharing social network authentication gateways across groups of government agencies, it can provide benefit to users and government alike.

In the longer term, government will be able to verify citizens online when they wish to enrol themselves for services. The possibility arises to use the Document Verification Service (DVS) combined with social history to connect an entity to an identity, but that may be a discussion for another time.

I’d love to hear what you think.

Alex

This article originally appeared under the title “Can social login be privacy enhancing” in the May 2014 edition of Privacy Unbound, the journal of the International association of privacy professionals (IAPP) Australia New Zealand chapter and can be found here at this link iappANZ_MayJournal

Privacy strengthened in Australia

The Australian Privacy Principles come into force on 12 March. The APPs extend coverage of privacy laws to most business with turnover of $3 million or more.

Fines of $1.7 million are possible for breaches.

Execs bow post Playstation breach in 2011

Australian Privacy Principles

The Privacy Act now includes a set of 13 new harmonised privacy principles. The APPs regulate personal information handling by the federal government. In addition, the law significantly expands the number of private sector organisations covered.

The new Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) replace both the Information Privacy Principles (IPPs) that applied to Australian Government agencies and the National Privacy Principles (NPPs) that applied to some private sector organisations. The changes do not generally replace existing state of territory privacy legislation (eg Victoria & ACT) which will probably cause some confusion at the edges

A number of the APPs are quite different from the existing principles, including

APP 7 -on the use and disclosure of personal information for the purpose of direct marketing, and

APP 8 – on cross-border disclosure of personal information.

The OAIC gets teeth

The Privacy Act now includes greater powers for the OAIC which include:

conducting assessments of privacy compliance for both Australian Government agencies and some private sector organisations.

accepting enforceable undertakings

seeking civil penalties in the case of serious or repeated breaches of privacy

In some ways Australia is just catching up with Europe, Canada and USA, but its worth noting that breaches can mean organisations get fines of up to $1.7 million. It is probably an understatement to say that this could have a serious impact on company finances as well as reputations.

One thing that is very good about these changes is that there is better alignment with good information security practice. We hope that these changes may help some organisations improve the state of their information security as they become privacy compliant.

A new mandatory credit reporting privacy code (CR code), created by the Australian Retail Credit Association ( OAIC’s Codes Register ) also starts on 12 March 2014.

We can help

We are helping government agencies and businesses assess the privacy impact of their activities in light of these legal changes. In particular, we have recently worked with the health and finance sectors in Queensland, the ACT and Victoria.
Please contact us at Resilience Outcomes for assistance.

Cyber Identity theft service sold personal information on US citizens by compromising multinational consumer and business data aggregators

An identity theft service that sells Social Security numbers, birth records, credit and background reports on millions of US residents has allegedly infiltrated computers at some of America’s largest consumer and business data aggregators, including Dun & Bradstreet according to Krebs on Security.

If you’re Australian or a resident of other countries where these guys operate, you had better hope that these companies didn’t leak information between their subsidiaries and the main office – because you know that would never ever (cross fingers) happen !!

This looks like a solid investigation by the guys/gals at Krebs. The hackers at the back of this identity theft service didn’t exfiltrate data from their targets wholesale, they just compromised the targets and allowed their customers to directly query information and charged them between 50c and $2.50 US for personal records and up to $15 for credit checks – via Bitcoin or Webmoney of course!

Compromised systems accessed through the criminal service seem to include

Dun & Bradstreet – an identity service that also has a presence in Australia as a credit reference agency

Importantly, the compromise was probably targeted as much on gaining information about companies to take out fraudulent loans on them according to a Gartner analyst. If a criminal can masquerade as a large company, they can take out a much larger loan on their behalf than they could on all but the richest people.

This may take a little while to play out, but it is likely to have an impact on legislative requirements for information security by data aggregator firms. By their very nature, they hold aggregated data from millions of customers. Each piece of data requires protections, together the data becomes far more valuable and therefore a greater target for cyber criminals and foreign espionage. How we deal with aggregation remains one of the keys to the risk based handling of big data.

“Trust is the currency of the new economy”

You may have heard recently about the efforts being promoted by the USA and Australia amongst others to promote trusted online identities. There are also significant efforts in the private sector to develop online trust systems.

Trust will be the currency of the new economy as it was in the mediaeval village. During the late 19th and early 20th Century, formal identity credentials gradually replaced more informal systems of identifying people that we interacted with. Increasing population and technology drove this change. It was simply impossible to know everybody that you might deal with and so societies began to rely on commonly used credentials such as drivers’ licences to prove identity and ‘place’ in society. Of course, drivers’ licences don’t say much if anything about reputation. But if you think about high value financial transactions you establish your identity and then you give a mechanism to pay for the transaction. Although in most cases it wouldn’t matter who you are, it gives the vendor some comfort that the name on your driver’s licence is the same as on your credit card and makes it just that bit more difficult to commit fraud on the vendor if the credit card isn’t legit. However this isn’t the case with interbank lending. Most of this is done on a trust basis within the ‘club’ of banks and it is only at a later time that the financials are tallied up for the day.

You can’t trust who or what is on the other end of the keyboard just because of what they say

What is a trusted ID?

Most simply, trusted online identity systems are the online equivalent of a physical credential such as a drivers’ licence used to give evidence of identity online. They can (but don’t have to) also be the basis for online reputation. They may also say something about the rights of the credential holder, such as that they are a resident in a particular country.

Some countries have already implemented online identity systems simply by migrating their physical identity cards online and allowing these to be used as trusted online systems. A number of Asian countries including Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore have proportions of their online services available through such means. Estonia probably leads the world in online service delivery with around 90% of the population having access to an online ID card and around 98% of banking transactions being via the Internet. More information at the Estonia EU website. While NSTIC was issued by the USA government, it calls for the private sector to lead the development of an Identity Ecosystem that can replace passwords, allow people to prove online that they are who they claim to be, and enhance privacy. A tall order which runs the risk of creating an oligopoly of identity systems driven by corporate interests and not one which suits users. It may be a signal of things to come that Citibank and Paypal have recently been accepted to lead development of the NSTIC. There are also a number of private sector initiatives which come at the issue from a different perspective. Beyond Paypal, Google Wallet and the recently announced Apple Passbook are interesting initiatives which give some of the attributes of a trusted identity.

Why might we want one?

As more services go online from both government and business and more people want to use them there will be an increased demand for a way of proving who you are online without having to repeat the process separately with each service provider. In some ways this is already happening when we use PayPal to buy products not only on eBay, where it originated but also on Wiggle.co.uk and many others. The problem is that different services need different levels of trust between the vendor and the purchaser. Thinking about a transaction in terms of risk… The majority of private sector transactions online carry equal risk for both the vendor and customer. In that the customer risks that he or she won’t get a product or service from the transaction and the vendor risks that they won’t get the cash. Here online escrow services such as Transpact, or PayPal can help.

Where this doesn’t work well is where there complexity to the transaction. The banking or government services sector are key areas where this is the case. Here the vendor must know their customer. One area might be analysing whether a customer can pay for a service on credit. Another is in applying for a passport, you need to prove that you are a citizen and pay a fee. However, the intrinsic value of the passport is far greater than the face value, as shown by the black market price. The result to the government if it issues the passport to the wrong person is not the value of the nominal fee, but closer to the black market value of the passport.

As a result, we are at an impasse online, in order for more ‘high trust’ services to go online the community has to have more trust that people are who they say they are.

Who might need a trusted identity?

If you take the Estonian example, 90% of the population. Most of us carry around some form of identity on our persons that we can present if required. In some countries, it’s the law that a citizen must carry their identity card around with them. In Australia and Canada and other countries, it’s a bit more relaxed. In the end the question will be whether a trusted id is used by customers and required by vendors. This will be influenced by whether there are alternative ways of conveying trust between people and institutions which are independent of the concept of identity in the traditional sense of the word

Next time:

What are the security and safety implications of a trusted identity and a discussion of about social footprint and whether this may overtake government efforts